Israel and Gaza are a Pathé newsreel of violence. Atrocity mounts upon atrocity. Blood smeared on gristle. Festivals mottled with corpses. Women dragged off to be raped and killed. And, now, perhaps the ultimate taboo. “This is the most difficult …
Israel and the rise of a new world order
Within hours of Hamas’s attack on Saturday, the celebrations had started in Iran. The Office of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei released a new propaganda video, glorifying the so-called “Al Aqsa Storm” operation. In Tehran’s “Palestine Square”, regime flunkies …
Nato won’t win a long war in Ukraine
As grand acts of foreign diplomacy go, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s recent trip to Washington will make the history books for all the wrong reasons. From the moment his jet touched down, the Ukrainian president was greeted with a lukewarm reception, and …
One year on, who blew up Nord Stream 2?
So whodunnit? Who destroyed the Nord Stream 2 at three minutes past midnight on September 26, 2021? Explosives set 262 feet below the surface of the Baltic caused a blast registering 2.5 on the Richter Scale. It ripped apart the …
Will we execute the Russian oligarchs?
As the war was starting in the early hours of February 24, 2022, when the CIA was forecasting Kyiv’s imminent fall and a quick victory for Moscow, a wealthy Russian friend mailed me for my views. His own were conveyed …
How Kim Jong Un became Prince Charming
When a reclusive North Korean dictator makes his lumbering way to Russia on a luxurious armour-plated train, the world cannot help but watch. And Kim Jong Un’s trip to visit Vladimir Putin in the Russian Far East was no exception. …
An Arctic war is coming
In a land of extremes, nowhere in the Arctic does the temperature oscillate more wildly than the tiny settlement of Fort Yukon in north-eastern Alaska. This village — of a few hundred residents belonging to the indigenous Gwich’in community, and …
The dawn of the Brics World Order
Last week’s Brics summit was supposed to herald the dawn of a new world order. It would announce the end of the American era and the rise of another, this time belonging to developing nations. It would even, according to …
How Putin is weaponising Prigozhin
Even in Russia, where the line between fact and fiction is often impossibly blurred, the life and death of Yevgeny Prigozhin is a fantastic tale. Two months ago, having been pilloried as a traitor who had threatened to bring down …
Lessons from an old-school mercenary
The death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, master mercenary, readily evokes a host of analogies: Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives, King Phillip IV’s immolation of the Knights Templar, the Biblical injunction that he who takes up the sword shall.
I have …
Anarchy ended our imperial dream
It’s 1994 and Robert D. Kaplan is in China’s Xinjiang Province, home to 11 million Turkic Uyghur Muslims whom the world now knows as the Uyghurs. He soon learns they are “trapped in a grip of surveillance and brutal repression …
Has Xi Jinping bankrupted China?
It is hard to tell when a crisis in a dictatorial regime, such as the sudden breakdown of China’s economic model, is not about this or that, but about the regime itself. My own experience in this regard is very …
Does Ukraine need to compromise?
Over the past year and a half, calls for peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia have been widely dismissed by the Ukrainian government and its more maximalist online supporters as either Putinist propaganda or defeatism. Yet the so-far lacklustre results …
How Ukraine is using animal propaganda
A “big, white bear of a dog” called Bayraktar, named after the Turkish-made drone that neutralised a Russian convoy heading for Kyiv; a scarred black poodle called Dishika, after the belt-fed, tripod-mounted DShK machine gun that has taken down dozens …
How MBS wins friends and influences people
Prior to the 1973 Arab oil embargo, nobody cared much for Saudi Arabia: a largely nomadic, pre-industrial desert nation with a population smaller than London. But in the last 50 years, it has become a friend worth cultivating. So much …